B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum

Tell us about interesting projects involving biblical Greek. Collaborative projects involving biblical Greek may use this forum for their communication - please contact jonathan.robie@ibiblio.org if you want to use this forum for your project.

Abbott-Smith's 1919-1921 (1922 2nd ed.) lexicon is is the public domain. It is perhaps one of the best Greek lexicons of the NT that is in the public domain. It's my desire to get this up and going on B-Greek. I've watched several start-ups over the last five years, and they have all seemed to fizzle out. I had been working for several years to get this into an html format and get it posted up on the web. I have got a database of all the entries, page numbers, and more. My former partner and I had the idea of retrieving an image of an entry, as the the first stage to digitizing the entire lexicon. We had gotten to the point of adjusting the borders of the images, when an illness put an end to that endeavor (we actually had images for every entry separated.) Last year, one of our members, Daniel C. Owens had posted that he was getting a project up and running, but that seems to have not progressed. See the link http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1393&p=7170&hilit=abbott#p7171 and https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/openscriptures/jKg0luaGD4U. This is a project that could help many in the third world who cannot afford BDAG or who only have access to Strong and Thayer's lexicon, or a pdf of Abbott-Smith.

Work on Abbott-Smith has continued since my original post, though the project has been silent for the last two months. The latest release can always be viewed at http://www.textonline.org/files/abbott- ... lease.html. Currently we have more than 550 entries completed, including all words that occur 100+ times in the GNT.

The most urgent need is to clean up the text that was generated by OCR software, particularly keying in unicode Greek and Hebrew but also cleaning up the English. After that the text can be marked up in XML.

All are welcome to contribute. Contributors should register at Github.com and send me a private message so I can add you as a contributor to the project.

Louis and Daniel,Thank you all for working on this and the other projects. I think I'll try to give a hand here. I can type Greek well enough. What would increase my motivation to do it is whether or not it will end up as Online dictionary only or one that could be downloaded.

One possible misperception about 3rd World use of online resources came up on some B-Greek thread. At least in my experience, It is not necessarily better to have small, easily loadable HTML pages versus one big file to download. When you pay for Internet by the byte, you might want to get it all over with once, load it on something, and then never have to spend money to look at it again. Or, if you have cheap Internet that doesn't charge you by the byte, you will be waiting for a few minutes for the smallest page to load. Again, you might want to let the think download over the next few days so that you don't have to wait everytime you use it. The practical use of something like this dictionary in this 3rd world country would more likely to be to download it and have it printed... something I've done many times for my students.